Bluebeam Revu provides a useful mechanism for reducing the size of PDFs to allow you to share them over email or document management systems with ease. Additionally, reducing the size of your PDF can help shorten load times and ensure seamless navigation through your documents.

With the Reduce File Size tool, Revu compresses bitmap images and removes non-visible document data, giving you various options to ensure the quality of your document remains as you need it. Reduce File Size will only affect raster content (scanned documents) and will have no effect on vector content.

In general, using Reduce File Size should be the last step when working with a document, as this tool is not able to be undone. If you have any flattened markups with Markup Recovery, reducing the file size will make it so those markups are no longer able to become Unflattened. It’s always recommended to create a copy of your document before attempting Reduce File Size to ensure that you still have access to your original PDFs after the compression process.

This article will show you the basics of using the Reduce File Size tool in Bluebeam Revu. These examples are taken using the 64x Bluebeam Revu 2019 eXtreme edition, but these functionalities are available within all versions of Revu.

With Revu running, open the document that you would like to reduce the file size of. Remember, this tool can only be done on raster content and will have no effect on vector content.

Select the Document dropdown menu, and then navigate down to the Reduce File Size option.

A dialogue box will open with the options available for your file size reduction. Revu comes preloaded with several preset settings designed to balance document quality with the amount of compression that will be applied. You can switch through these options using the slider bar.

If you want more control over the Reduce File Size settings, you can also create a custom setting by selecting Custom Preset, then Edit.

A dialogue box will open where you can adjust the compression settings for images, fonts, and metadata currently present in your PDF. It may be useful to look at the colored bar at the bottom of this box to see what types of data are taking up space in your PDF. You can also keep track of the current file size and the estimate reduction to make sure you are able to reduce your PDF to the size you need it to be.

Press OK to exit this dialogue box, then Save once you are ready to run the Reduce File Size tool. A dialogue box will appear to ask you if you would like to Overwrite the previous document. It is recommended to select “No” here so that you still have your original document if you need to make any additional changes. If you do select No, you will be prompted to name and save your new document before Reduce File Size is run.

The Reduce File Size Results will appear to let you know the original file size along with the new file size and the percentage of overall reduction. Now, you can easily take your PDF and email it and share it with collaborators without needing to worry about the file size being too large or load times being too long.

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Lauren Hecker is a Bluebeam Certified Instructor and teaches Onsite Bluebeam Certified Courses, virtual Bluebeam Basics and Advanced courses, and custom onsite or virtual courses. To see her next open enrollment course, please visit our calendar. To schedule an onsite or custom course, please contact us!